In memory of BC Pires, June 2, 1958-October 21, 2023.
Baz and I knew each other for more than half a lifetime, though that wasn’t long enough.
We met in the newsroom, and I had the pleasure of being his colleague and his editor for almost all that time, but more than that – entwined with that – I had the privilege and the greater pleasure of being his friend.
Many people have already written about “BC” and the nature and quality and influence of his work, but there remain two things, at least for now, that I want to say about him.
Firstly, many people who have commented on his writing describe him, and it, as “irreverent,” which I’m sure he enjoyed. But I think it’s wrong.
Yes, he liked to shock people, by making fun of ideas and institutions that were considered sacred because they were old and widespread and taken for granted, but which didn’t deserve it.
He took glee in being, eventually, the oldest teenage rebel in town.
But he wasn’t at all the iconoclast that people take him for. What inspired the most fiery indignation in Baz was lack of reverence for some very old-fashioned values, which he upheld fervently not from habit or because they were ancient, but because he had thought them through and concluded that they were right. He treated other people – not just other people, other sentient creatures – with kindness, decency, honesty and fairness, and expected them to aim for the same standards. And somehow he managed never to give up, to resign himself to that’s just how things are, nothing you can do about it.
As for the second thing: his best friend James Aboud outed Baz as a former believer, in an affectionate, funny, lovely piece which he wrote with Baz’s permission, and which we published on October 22, the morning after he died.
I’m going to out Baz too, as being after all a believer in…something, many years later. For over a month, I’ve been the only person left in the world who knows this story, and it feels as if it needs to be shared.
It may not mean anything. It may be pure wishful thinking. It may be about an absolutely random, trivial event. But if I’m being sentimental, you’ll have to forgive me: I’m not ready to let go of my friend yet.
Also, even if this happening meant nothing more, it shows how closely Baz noticed small things, and his ability to find beauty in them, which were among the qualities that made him a writer; it shows how he loved this world, and the people in it; and the way he could extract all the possible pleasure to be found in the here and now, which they say is one of the keys to happiness. He wasn’t always happy, of course. But he was very good at unearthing happiness and embracing it, wherever it lay.
After Baz and his wife Carla and the children went to live in Barbados, he would come to Trinidad at intervals to gather a garland of interviewees for his Trini to the Bone series of profiles (another good thing about him was that he found something remarkable to show the rest of us in every one of those people).
At home or away, Baz would relig
